Rictus
by larks-landing
Summary: That's the miraculous effect of time; it makes one appreciative of history, what one can learn from it, and how to move on.
People so easily become obsessed with the idea of themselves as the victim. The common person's imaginative ability is both curious and a little bit frightening. The heights our minds will leap to. Take a car crash, for example. Gruesome as they so very often are, one cannot look away. The wreckage simply demands your attention. Because what if that were you, curled up in the shattered glass? What if.

The salvage work on Geosenge Town rotates like clockwork, by the hour and for the hour, because there is something just as gruesome about the crystalline ruins of the weapon as shattered windshield glass – a car flipped over like a ledyba on its back. People stare. They become transfixed, because what if that were you in the rubble? What if that was _your_ ashen face, gasping in relief when sunlight fell across your face, a sight you never thought you'd see again?

Thing is, workers who don't work are useless. Ergo, the rotating shift system. It keeps them away from the wreckage.

Serena soothes the young woman she's just found with a quiet hum. She hooks her arms beneath the woman's and gently lifts, waiting for any sound or sign of pain. She slips out from the rubble, tears tracking through the dirt on her face.

"You're almost there," Serena tells her – mindless comfort, really. She doubts the poor woman can hear anything over the sound of her own gasping relief. The blood rushing through her ears. Xerneas knows Serena barely does, sometimes.

She calls for help, and another worker picks his way through the rock, taking the woman from her with a nod. He lifts her easily, speaking to her in a quiet, lilting voice as he makes his way back to the lift. Serena returns to the rubble.

No one has ever tried to enforce the _by the hour, for the hour_ rule on her, and that's partly because she wouldn't let them, but mostly because Serena cannot see herself as the victim here, so the fixation just isn't there.

Still. There's a hole in Geosenge Town. There is a gaping wound in the earth, just as there is in so many of Geosenge's people and those from Flare who survived, blood drying to a dull dust among the shining shards, and there's no easy way to bandage such a thing.

Serena looks at the wreckage and thinks, _I put this here._ She's not taken in by the same sympathy – or empathy. Calem would insist on calling it that – because that's not who she is here. Rather, Serena is obsessed with the idea of herself as the destroyer, as the weapon, as red and black slashed across the canvas of the earth – violent and lovely and ruined.

Speak of the devil, Serena looks up and catches Calem's eye across the sea of rock and rubble. He waves. Ashy rubble has turned his dark hair near white. Serena returns the gesture. He is, of course, the opposite, as any good rival would be. He is blue and white, pale like the sky. Some days, she looks at him and longs for the same.

So, who's the real weapon here? Serena gazes down at the glittering mess of something so terrible yet so beautiful, and the dark of the caves below refracts back up to her. The shards reflect gold, lustre eaten from the inside out.

* * *

It begins as barely a hum – in the fractious moments just after the weapon collapses in on itself, falling back into the earth from whence it came.

Little dust particles, so fine and clear, glimmer through the air as they float upwards. They drift so beautifully, and Serena refuses to read into it any more than that. She refuses to look from the rubble.

She stares down at the utter _wreck_ , because the rubble is what she _deserves_ , not the motes of quiet loveliness. She feels something roil in her empty stomach, sharing not even a little bit of Shauna's enthusiasm or Calem's quiet satisfaction at a job well done. They haven't cottoned on yet to what it is exactly that they've done here, but they will. Xerneas knows they will, and Serena will scream herself to pieces when they do – when Shauna sobs, and Calem goes horribly silent.

Her eyes catch on every little thing that's not grey. Perhaps she looks for red, for life, for any sign that she didn't sentence hundreds to die. Serena breathes in the dust of it, and she coughs it back out.

AZ steps forward then, and rumbles, "For one moment, children, be still. See what has been done."

Serena is forced to look up, to silently skim the faces of her friends, and watch them devolve into hysteria. She fixes her gaze on AZ. It's hard, what with the height and all that hair, but Serena thinks that she may see something similar there. If AZ is condemned to forever walk in the light of the weapon, then so is she.

It's a condemning thought.

* * *

Serena raps on the door to the cabin Calem shares with Trevor and Tierno and waits, worrying the mega ring between her dusty fingers. She'd forgone her standard five minute hand wash to get this done.

She rocks back on her heels, biting at her lip, and curses herself for it a moment later. _Composure_ , she tells herself. Composure, if nothing else.

"Hey," Calem says, opening the door. "What's up?"

His hands are clean. He did not skip his regular routine. Serena doesn't think; she tugs his hand off the door and presses the mega ring into his palm. Her hands do not shake, because Serena is far too accomplished an actress to let them.

"I think you should have it," she says. The anxiety is slipping over her eyes and dripping down her throat, making it hard to breathe, so she plasters her smile on harder. It'll be fine. She's fine.

Calem blinks in surprise, eyebrows arching beneath his mussed fringe. "But it's yours," he replies, frowning. "You won it, Serena. Besides, I – I don't want it."

"Yes, you do," Serena says, because he does. He has always wanted the mega ring and everything it represents. She knows Calem, and she knows how it grated to lose it in the first place. "And I want you to have it. Okay?"

He doesn't argue, because few argue with what Serena wants. She's charismatic, so it's futile, really. She fastens the clasp around his wrist. She smiles.

She smiles, and it is brittle, like glass shards. A car crash. "Good," she says. "Have a goodnight, Calem. Tell Trev and Tierno I said so, too."

"Will do," says Calem, worry writ in his brow. Serena leaves before he shuts the door, looping back to her own cabin. She sleeps like the dead.

* * *

It was a _button_. It was a choice, a simple yes-no, red-blue; pick wrong and sentence millions upon millions to death. Pick _wrong_ , and murder an entire population.

That's the problem, you see. Serena picked wrong.

* * *

She swaps out her skirt for a pair of shorts and her curls for a tail high on her head. She threads her hair through the back of a baseball cap and goes through her pack for the third time.

Pokéballs? Check. Medical supplies? Check, again. Assorted dried food. Check, check, check. She waffles on her holo caster, for her pokémon's sake, if nothing else; she couldn't bear it if something happened to one of them, and she couldn't get them medical help.

In the end, after lacing up her hiking boots, she shuts it down and crams it into her pocket. When she carefully pulls her cabin door open, it is the breaking of dawn that greets her. Geosenge is quiet, and the wreckage sight is empty.

Serena locks the door behind her, but she leaves the key in the lock.

She takes the long way around town so as to avoid the craters, among other things. Refugees, namely, whom she's known to take early morning walks or sit quiet vigils in the hastily constructed graveyard. Serena is quick and quiet; their business is not her business, just as hers is not theirs.

The rock gate that leads out to Route 11 understandably collapsed during the quake, so Serena carefully climbs up and over, dropping sure feet onto the other side. The crystal spires shine pale blue and pink amongst the wildflowers and meadow grass.

She'd thought them tourist drivel, initially; Serena's mother bought her a trivia book about Kalos when she told her they were moving to Vaniville, and Serena read it cover to cover, determined to land on her feet. " _One can feel the power of the earth's interior from the crystals that sprout along this mountain path_ ," the book read. She screwed up her nose at that passage, attributing any and all mystical effects to light refracting through glass – a fabricated tourist trap.

But she knows the power that lurks beneath the earth, now, and she knows how it shivers down her spine. The crystals creep across her shoulders like a cold brush of fingers – gentle, unlike the weapon. The weapon dug in its nails and _dragged_.

Serena watches the crystals glow in the faint light of dawn. It feels like blame, but maybe she's projecting. She plucks a fresh sitrus berry from an overhanging tree and makes wide circles around the glowing rock. The mouth of Reflection Cave lurks in the distance, dark and fathomless, though Serena remembers the glittering beauty within – crystal so smooth they stand like mirrors.

She licks at a rivulet of juice before it can drip down her chin. It tangs sharply on her tongue, and the wind whistles through the caves. She stops before the mouth of the cave and shakes the unease from her shoulders.

The dark was never one of Serena's childhood fears, but the light does not leave her as she delves into the caves. She thinks perhaps this is worse; phantom faces jeer at her in the mirrored walls, reflecting her wide eyes and dull pallor. The ground beneath her feet shines violet. Serena is not claustrophobic, either, but she is in the belly of the beast, and the beast is broken.

She runs like a bat out of hell.

* * *

People will wonder where she's gone. Serena knows that. One does not make headlines and expect to disappear quietly. One cannot make friends and expect them to simply let you go.

Serena leaves anyway.

Perhaps she has reasons: she can't face her mother, not when so many mothers will never see their daughters again. She can't look Calem in the face another day and brave the worry and the pity there, because it is slowly but surely cracking her clean down the middle.

Shauna would hug her tight and never let go, if she could see Serena now, which is why she can't. Serena's not sure that she's made for hugging – not anymore. Her arms are better made for throwing pokeballs and pressing buttons that end the world than hugging.

Red buttons and red pokéballs. It's funny, how much power one little capsule can give you. She remembers how Lysandre's apparatus has crashed to the ground, smashed, and the way Flare grunts would run at the sight of her, by the end.

Everyone wants to save the world, Serena thinks. It is how people justify the horrible things they do. Conviction is a terrible and frightening thing, she thinks. One is always in the right, even when one is wrong. Especially, then.

* * *

The pathways that wander Santalune Forest branch off into smaller and smaller paths, rapidly disappearing into the undergrowth. Serena picks one and follows it further and further into the dark of the woods.

She eats what berries she can remember Trevor telling her were safe, once upon a time, and she only purses her lips once at the thought of drinking out of a stream before her thirst gets the better of her. When she bends her head over the burbling water, she catches a wavering glimpse of herself, and she laughs, because she is absolutely _ragged_. Wild, almost, after almost a week.

Perhaps she'll grow another three feet or so. Then she and AZ can be twins.

Serena always thought herself a city girl, but the deep darkness of the forest is what she deserves – its silence. There is something frightening about the way the shadows grow long at dusk, and she almost relishes her fear.

On the fifth day, perhaps, a soft rustle of leaves draws her attention. She startles, sharply, sending the book she'd been flipping through skittering across the forest floor.

"Child," AZ says, slow like glaciers, "what yearns to be found will never be lost."

She forgot how cryptic the old giant could be. Scrambling for her book, hopelessly creased by being crushed at the bottom of her pack, she splutters: "I beg your pardon?"

Without preamble, he fold his long legs and joins her on the forest floor. Serena still has to crane her head to meet his gaze. His old eyes crinkle at the corners, and Serena would think it amusement lurking there, but what would she know of thousand year old kings?

"If you wish to lose yourself," he continues, "you are not doing so very well."

"Well, you'd know all about that," Serena returns, surprisingly hoarse, with an undercurrent of petulance. Trust older people to bring out _that_ particular side of her.

AZ tips his head, agreeing.

"That being said, I haven't seen anyone in days, and I haven't the slightest clue where I am." Serena sniffs. "I'd call that lost, thank you very much."

"I began searching for you this very morning," AZ replies. Serena blinks, looking up at the sky – tracking the sun. Noon? A frown creases her face, which she immediately flattens, because frowning won't do. She plasters a smile on instead.

Serena tries for nonchalance. "Alright. You found me." She crosses her arms. "Why were you looking?"

"I wish to show you something, if you will permit it."

Considering her only real plans for the day had been to walk and walk and walk until she ran out of forest, this seems better. Less mind-numbing at the very least. "Why not?" she asks, and AZ smiles, drawing himself back up to his immense height and gesturing forward.

* * *

In the museums, this is how they tell AZ's story –

 _It is in the Ancient Age that the first Kalosian king appears. His curious origins have been attributed to many factors, but the most popular theory among scholars attributes his status as ruler to his immense height. While anthropologists have proven that the Kalosian people of the Ancient Age stood tall – at approximately a formidable nine feet – legends say that the First King stood even taller; thusly, as historians hold, the king was crowned for this biological feat._

 _He was said to be a good king. Ancient art depicts him as a benevolent ruler; mosaic and tessellation found in ruins show him holding audiences with his subjects and going to battle against the fearsome wild pokémon hoards to protect them._

 _Then there was the First War, and_ – and the weapon. Serena remembers. That's the miraculous effect of regret; it makes one appreciative of history, and what one can learn from it.

* * *

The forest grows denser and darker as they walk, Serena's gaze affixed to AZ's enormous shoulders. Slight tessellations of sunlight skitter through the leaves, scattering themselves along the forest floor, but there is no blue to be found when Serena chances a glance skyward.

She swallows hard and returns her gaze to the giant before her.

The trees become thicker, their branches daring to reach higher and their leaves drooping down, as if to reach out and brush against them. When Serena catches a glimpse of grey stone, barely visible through a coat of ivy, she startles.

"Where are we?" she asks.

"Where do you think?" AZ returns, infuriatingly ancient.

Serena gives the area a long look. Her small glimpse of grey extends into a wall, which extends into a tower, which extends into a soaring parapet. "Ruins?" she offers, more tentative than she'd like.

"Yes." AZ brushes his hands against his sides. "Ruins."

The forest has nearly swallowed this relic whole, but as AZ runs a gentle hand over a hanging branch, Serena knows he prefers it this way. Her eyes sketch over the skeletons of spiralling towers and the last vestiges of a once-proud fortress, and she has to agree.

"Let me tell you a story," AZ says.

Serena digs a toe into the dirt. "I like stories," she returns. "But only if they have happy endings."

"This one might not." Something rueful twists his mouth. "Though perhaps that depends on the interpretation. Will you hear it despite this?"

She nods. There is nothing here but the wind whispering through the trees and birdsong. She can stomach another sad story.

"I shall not bore you with the tale of my ascension," AZ rumbles, weaving his hands together before him. He raises them up, flattening them to a plane, and he waits. "For I have an inkling that it is a tale you know well."

"You're in the history textbooks, so yes."

A small fletchling slips out of the song and flutters down towards them, lightly landing atop AZ's palms. It regards him with warm black eyes, nosing at its wings.

"Instead I will tell you this." He runs a careful finger over the small bird's head, unbearably gentle. "Your people have lived in timidity for fear of another apocalypse for centuries. The fear and pain that seeps from the ruin you run from is known to this world already, whether you realize it or not." He hums. "What a contradiction you have become: too fearful to trust this earth but too bold for your soft, small bones."

"Unlike your big, strong bones, yes," Serena says.

He smiles down at her. She gets the feeling that she amuses him, if nothing else, which grates at her pride, but she's tired, and lost in the woods, so. Pick your battles, her mother would say.

"It is difficult to grow as tall as I when you bear my burden on your shoulders," he says. "It was I who first brought that pain to this land, child, and I remember that well, just as you do in your bones."

Serena blinks. "Like – muscle memory? _Genetic_ memory?"

AZ nods, pleased. "Trauma can linger for far longer than we perceive it to," he tells her. "Humanity has no conscious recollection of starving and screaming by my hand, but the body remembers what the mind is inclined to forget – the fear."

"Okay," Serena says, "fine. You're telling me that you get it. And I appreciate that, I do, but it doesn't really – it doesn't _help_ , AZ. People are – people are _dead_ , and –"

"History may be compounded on paper," he goes on, as if she had not spoken, "but the true stories are written in our bones, and it is smeared in blood across crystal."

Serena falls silent.

"What I am trying to tell you, child, what I am trying to show you –" the fletchling takes off with a cry, tearing up into the canopy – "is that while your bones are small, they are _strong_. They survived utter destruction once, dear child. This too they will survive."

She takes that, and chews on it. She rolls the words around, and she swallows down hard. "But it's still my fault," she says, finally. "I picked wrong."

"For Lysandre there was no peaceful outcome." AZ scoffs. "For all he obsessed with beauty, there was none within him. What is the saying, child? He, hm. 'Rigged the game?'"

Serena startles. "Wait," she gasps. "Wait. _Both_ buttons would have fired the weapon?"

"Neither." AZ regards her gravely. "You made a brave and good choice. You fought a hard battle, and your foe did not even honour you by engaging in it. The destruction at Geosenge – it was beyond your control. It was not your hand that flipped the switch."

"But –"

"You did not make my same mistakes," AZ tells her, gently, a smile creasing his old face, "and though it will be hard, Serena, you too will survive this. Just as your ancestors did."

The wind whispers through the treetops, and the fletchlings sing their songs; and to Serena's ears, it sounds like a benediction.

* * *

"I have to say, I didn't think _I'd_ be the one to find you," says Korrina, padding across the Tower of Mastery's sweeping balcony. "And here of all places, too!"

Serena looks away from a passing cloud formation and over her shoulder. Korrina's rollerblades and helmet are gone, and she stands barefoot on the worn stone. Serena offers her a smile. It comes easier than she thought it would.

The tower was an impromptu stop on the way back to Geosenge, and one she hadn't really wanted to make, but the Tower calls, and when it calls, you _listen_.

"Everyone's been looking for you, you know," Korrina adds, coming to stand next to Serena. "You sort of disappeared."

"Sorry," Serena replies, ruefully. It was a given. She knew people would look, when she left, but she left anyway. A little bit of guilt roils in her stomach, but this – this she can fix. And she will, once she's done here. "I suppose I wasn't ready to be found yet."

"Fair enough." Korrina takes a big gulp of thin, fresh air. "So, where've you been?"

"On a journey," replies Serena, good-naturedly. "Working through some personal stuff. _Finding myself_."

Korrina grins, just as Serena hoped she would. "But I thought you did that already," she says, "what with the pokémon and the gyms."

"No," Serena laughs, shaking her head. "No. The first time, that was – that was _building_. This was something else entirely."

Korrina nods, like this makes sense to her. Maybe it does. Serena doesn't know her well enough to say. Then Korrina fixes her peerless blue eyes on her. "So, what did you learn?"

"Learn?" Korrina nods. Serena shrugs. "Who says I learned anything? Was I supposed to?"

Korrina elbows her, a smile tugging at her mouth. "It's just that you look different. Not so weighted down, maybe. What happened?"

"Someone told me I was being a little too hard on myself," Serena says. "That I was trying to clean up messes that I didn't make." She looks out, over the balcony, to a faint line of green in the distance. "Someone told me a story, and I wasn't the villain."

"Was that ever in question?" Korrina asks, tongue in cheek, and for that, Serena has to smile.

* * *

People so easily become obsessed with the idea of themselves as the victim, but Serena never even gave that a second thought. She called herself a weapon; she called herself a murderer, looking down at limp hands and red suit jackets – the lovingly constructed ramshackle graves perched at Geosenge's limits.

Everyone wants to save the world, Serena thinks. It is almost a biological imperative. But Serena remembers birdsong, and the barest glimpses of stone walls and parapets hidden beneath centuries of ivy, a forest in full bloom.

There is still a hole in Geosenge Town, and it will not close easily. But like any wound, it will heal. It will take time, but the rusted crystal will seep back into the earth, and Geosenge's citizens will pick up their lives and move on.

Everyone wants to save the world, Serena thinks. She remembers how Lysandre had promised them eternal life. She remembers how Xerneas' antlers had glowed, offering a similar promise as thanks.

Everyone wants to save the world, but – the wind whistles through the treetops, light winking through crystalline caves – everyone forgets that the world saves itself, in time.

This is not a car crash. It never was. Pale blue light sings forth from the earth, from the spires out on Route 11, and they whisper reassurance in Serena's ears, when the doubt creeps back.

Serena places a hand on the cool crystal, a spire older than she and still shining, and believes in the power of time. After all, that's the miraculous effect of it. It make one appreciative of history, what one can learn from it, and it shows you how to move on.


End file.
